


What You Bear

by KuribohIChooseYou



Series: Pridecember 2020 [5]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Content warnings:, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lowkey:, M/M, Other, Panic Attacks, Self Harm, Trigger warnings:, Vomit, Whump, Yu-Gi-Oh! Pridecember, Yu-Gi-Oh! Pridecember 2020, graphic description of physical trauma, ngl there's a lot of it, | - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27890617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KuribohIChooseYou/pseuds/KuribohIChooseYou
Summary: Five times Seto was given a reason to hate the color red, and the one time he was given a reason to love it.#5 - Red
Relationships: Atem/Kaiba Seto, Kaiba Gozaburo & Kaiba Seto, Kaiba Mokuba & Kaiba Seto, Kaiba Seto/Yami Yuugi, Kaiba Seto/Yami Yuugi | Atem, Pegasus J. Crawford | Maximillion Pegasus & Kaiba Seto
Series: Pridecember 2020 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2035153
Comments: 7
Kudos: 23





	What You Bear

**Author's Note:**

> 💔

Seto’s earliest memory of the color is one he truly has tried to forget but settles for locking it away. And some days he actually accomplishes that, burying it in that secret space under his lungs that not even Mokuba knows about. He tries to lose the key every time; he leaves it in empty coffee cups, in spare bedroom nightstands, in booster pack wrappers. And for the day, if he’s lucky, the space remains closed until he lays down at night and there’s no distractions and the space pesters him until he pays attention to it. Every so often, the space gives him a reprieve, a vacation from his own pain, and leaves him alone for days at a time. But no matter how hard he throws it, how far he tries to run from it, how much he wishes for it to leave, the key always ends up back in the lock of that space – that aching space under his lungs – and opens it.

The accident happened when he was eight. The details he learned years after – _drunk driver swerved into oncoming traffic, your dad swerved to avoid him, the tree was just there, the other driver walked away_ – things that were incomprehensible in that moment, and the ones that followed. What he remembered from that day was the unnatural crunching sound as the car made contact with something immoveable, launching both Seto and Mokuba as far forward as their respective seatbelt and car seat let them.

Mokuba’s crying brought him back to consciousness after some time. The first thing he noticed was the pain; the deep ache across his chest under the seat belt, the side of his head where his hair felt sticky and warm, the sharp pricks of dozens of cuts across his exposed arms and legs from pieces of shattered glass, glittering wherever they lay.

He unclicked his seatbelt and checked Mokuba – nothing that looked serious, thank god – some cuts here and there but otherwise unscathed. Seto reached a hand out to shake his father’s shoulder, calling out, “Dad?” in a hoarse, small voice. When he didn’t rouse, Seto panicked. He shook the shoulder harder, trying to clear his throat to speak louder, and crawled onto the console ignoring the glass that cut into his knees.

Seto’s father’s head was lolled to one side, away from him, and Seto knew that wasn’t good. He grabbed his father’s shirt, shaking it as he tried to rouse him, as he reasoned that the gash where a chunk of the windshield was embedded wasn’t that bad – it couldn’t be that bad. The burn of tears down his cheeks, the evidence of his grief pouring from his nose, was nothing compared to the warmth of the blood that coated Seto’s hands. The feel of it as it coated him up to his elbows, sticky sweet and so hot on Seto’s cold skin, and the starkness of it across his pale forearms, as he tried to get his father to wake, screaming for help.

That’s the moment he always wakes up from the nightmare. The one that he hides away, the one he’ll never tell Mokuba about, and every day he is silently thankful Mokuba was so young, and doesn’t remember it at all.

* * *

Three years later, Mokuba fell off the jungle gym in the orphanage’s playground, catching the edge of his forehead and ripping open the skin. His brother screamed as Seto tried to stop the bleeding and calm him down, pressing his hands into the wound and watching the thick dark liquid seep between the cracks. And the memory of the accident – of Seto’s hands stained from another family member’s blood and the squelching of it as he grabbed at his father - came back so fiercely and so unforgivingly that Seto screamed louder than Mokuba and flinched away, trying to rub the blood off onto his clothes, anything, just to get it off his hands. He has to help Mokuba but he can’t move his legs, his throat is wide open and he can’t stop screaming, he just has to get clean, it isn’t coming off –

When he woke up in the nurse’s office in fresh clothes, on a cot next to Mokuba, neither of them spoke about the incident. He tells Mokuba his stitches (four to be exact – apparently even shallow head wounds bleed profusely) look cool and Mokuba smiles so he leaves it at that. They both are allowed back to the boy’s dorms after they’ve eaten, and Mokuba is sound asleep in the bed next to him as he muffles his cries, pinching the skin of his forearm until it bruises, because he knows he has failed the one thing on this planet he was meant to do: protect his brother. Mokuba needed him, and he couldn’t help him; he had vowed to _never_ let that happen. He’d make sure it never happened again.

* * *

When Seto first saw Gozaburo up close, a daunting and intimidating man to even a grown adult, the color of the man’s suit nearly burned his eyes. The garishness of it, of a man of such renown, wearing such an awful color. Seto held his breath as the memory of the smell threatened to turn his stomach, and powered through the game of chess. The triumphant feeling from winning, from besting Gozaburo at his own game, was short-lived and didn’t return for several years until the man was dead.

Every memory of life under that man’s thumb was pockmarked with the kind of anger that turns one’s eyesight the same color as that godawful suit. The man had tried to beat the fight from him, told him he was worthless and nothing and nobody, and Seto bested him at his own game, for the second time. When his second father died, Seto could barely tell the difference between what was the color of the suit and what was from the blood. He used his foot to turn Gozaburo on his back, and nudged his shoulder with the toe of his shoe, but this time when he tried to rouse his father to wake, he felt only relief when he didn’t.

* * *

The first time Kaiba had to excuse himself from a corporate meeting was when he first met Pegasus. He held his breath as the eccentric man walked in through the glass doors, the wave of nausea cresting when Pegasus called him _boy_. He sat across the conference table from him, and listened as he offered to buy KaibaCorp, to buy control of the company he himself had shaped into what it was now, asking condescendingly when Kaiba pushed back, “You and your sweet little brother would never want for anything the rest of your lives, are you _really_ going to turn that down?”

He wanted to take away Kaiba’s only bargaining chip with the universe, dressed in the same color as the man whose dead hands he had ripped it from. He told Pegasus to get the fuck out of his building. The other left, spewing threats the entire way. When the elevators closed behind Pegasus and his posse, Kaiba ran to the bathroom and vomited until it felt like his stomach was going to come out of his throat.

For the rest of the week, he was haunted by a new, expensive suit, one trimmed in frills and lace, but an awful suit just the same.

* * *

Kaiba could taste the heaviness of his hatred as he stood across the arena from Pegasus, fighting for his little brother’s soul. He hated how familiar this felt, standing across from a man in a crimson-colored tailored suit as he taunted and insulted him. The audacity of a man who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and went behind his back to use his father’s old cronies against him when he didn’t get what he wanted. What a very Gozaburo thing to do.

He lost his composure more and more as he realized he was losing – he couldn’t concentrate on this damn duel because of that fucking suit and the memory of the smell and of the violence men in suits resorted to around him – and he was failing to protect his brother for the second time. And when he did lose, he almost thanked Pegasus for imprisoning him in the damned card just so he wouldn’t have the satisfaction of watching Kaiba break down in front of him.

* * *

He couldn’t understand how anyone could love anything associated with the color; it was a tainted color - a cursed color. It stained every bad memory to the point he could easily dissect them and shove them down into that hidden space inside of him. He kept it out of his wardrobe, out of the furnishings of the mansion, and kept himself surrounded in blues and blacks and whites. Anyone who loved that particular color was an idiot – and anyone who didn’t believe him could go meet Joey Wheeler. What kind of idiot would love a dragon with eyes the color of hate?

* * *

He doesn’t know exactly when it happened, if it was after their first duel, or their second, or their fifth. It might have happened when he realized the Yugi with bold red eyes wasn’t really _Yugi_ , but someone else entirely. A worthy opponent: one who smirked at him from across the battle field instead of insulted. One who pushed him to be better – never told him he wasn’t good enough – but one who dragged him along and said, “I know you are better than this.” The one who destroyed him only to help him escape the grip of evil Gozaburo had left on his heart. The one who treated him as his equal in every way.

And when Kaiba lay down to sleep, in the still darkness of his bedroom, the color red danced across his dreams as he chased the gaze of the one who he so desperately tried to catch. His nightmares showed up less often and with less power; the sight of blood no longer sent him into a full-fledged panic attack. He caught himself seeking out that color in the other Yugi, the Pharaoh; wanting to drown himself in the depths of a garnet gaze that never threatened him or reminded him of his botched childhood.

And when the Pharaoh would look back, smirking like he knew something Kaiba didn’t, Kaiba was able to shove aside that locked box inside of himself. It never left him; he would carry it with him always, but he could put it down in the pleasure of the Pharaoh’s company. And in the still of the moments between card draws and witty quips, between magical bullshit and saving each other, he would let the thought cross his mind that maybe _red_ wasn’t such a bad color.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a NaNoWriMo prompt I made for myself, and I got lucky 'Red' was one of the Pridecember prompts. 
> 
> #6 will go back to your regularly scheduled pride fluff :)
> 
> If you want to scream at me, I will scream with you in the comments or you can find me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/kuriboh-i-choose-you)


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